I Walked Through Trump’s D.C. Hellscape. It’s Now Clear What Exactly the Feds Are Doing Here.

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No one would want to live in the District of Columbia of Donald Trump’s fever dream. At a press conference on Monday, the president described a city “overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals,” a place teeming with “roving mobs of wild youth” and “drugged-out maniacs.”

That was his excuse for deploying 800 National Guard troops and 500 federal agents to patrol the city and harass unhoused people for living on the street. He will also attempt to place the Metropolitan Police Department under federal control, though the extent to which he can legally take over remains to be seen.

For the past few days, all across D.C., federal law enforcement officers have been popping up in most incongruous places. Homeland Security officials wandered the pricey, condo-filled corridors of Navy Yard, where the baseball stadium sits. Border Patrol cops loitered on the sidewalks of a popular nightlife strip, where they got an earful from a passerby in a pink pointelle shirt. (They arrested him after he tossed his Subway sub at one of their bulletproof vests.) Over the weekend, a crew of Drug Enforcement Administration officers was spotted strolling along a path by the National Mall, surrounded by joggers and tourists enjoying the afternoon sun.

Bewildered by the sudden influx of armed and armored agents swarming my hometown, on Tuesday morning, I decided to walk a sweltering mile in their shoes. Trump claims that emergency conditions require him to use the MPD to protect federal buildings and national monuments—so I went down to the Mall to follow the pathway of those DEA agents, hoping to see what they saw.

What I witnessed was an idyllic scene of American tourism. A nerd in a Millennium Falcon shirt made a beeline for the Air and Space Museum. A French-speaking couple took videos of each other trying to mount their Lime scooters. A set of parents and their adult children sat in the shade of some trees, giddily sucking down Rocket Pops. A time traveler from 2014 used a selfie stick to get a shot of her whole family in front of the Capitol.

But through the tactical Oakleys I had procured for this mission, I sensed chaos and criminality lurking beneath the surface. The runners zooming by in those strange tiny vests—what’s the big hurry? Those sullen teens trailing their parents toward the taco truck—why the hooded sweatshirts in 84-degree heat and 72-percent humidity? The quadrillion boomer men and four Buddhist monks in performance-fabric bucket hats—what on earth were they hiding under there, besides their sun-sensitive scalps?

I also wondered about the three buff young men in baseball hats and Americana T-shirts—where had they been on Jan. 6, 2021?—but I assumed that Trump’s agents would have given them a pass. Unfortunately, the only blatant crimes I witnessed were two cars speeding through a red light and a man wearing a fedora, which is illegal summer attire in my book.

So I visited a few other parks where feds have been sighted in recent weeks. Even before the current deployment, Trump was ramping up federal policing in the District’s public spaces. A couple of weeks ago, United States Park Police officers in bulletproof vests and backward baseball hats handcuffed and carted away several people peacefully drinking beer and smoking weed in public parks. (Many of D.C.’s circles and parks are National Park Service property.) This was a shocking departure from standard policing in D.C., where law enforcement officers rarely hassle people if they’re discreet and minding their own business. A Park Police spokesman said the officers were enforcing one of the president’s executive orders, titled “Making the District of Columbia Safe and Beautiful.”

On Tuesday morning in Logan Circle, where some of those arrests were made, I saw a middle-aged man on a bicycle throwing rice to the sparrows. In Dupont Circle, where others were handcuffed, I witnessed a woman with a thong leotard poking out of her cargo skirt reading loudly from some kind of political tract. In Malcolm X Park, where a long-running techno party recently canceled an event for fear of harassment, I watched a line of Latino elders with shopping trolleys wait for a food bank distribution. On nearby benches, one person in scrubs and another in a reflective vest and hard hat ate their Tupperware lunches, like some kind of Village People reboot waiting to happen.

I rarely pay such close attention to who’s around me in public. When I did this morning, I was charmed by the characters near me and the microcosm of the city in each park. There were troubling signs of privation and a broken social safety net—the food bank line, an unhoused man sleeping on a bench—but despite Trump’s insistence that these people must be violently plucked out of American life rather than supported by their neighbors, they posed no threat to any of the other people living their lives in close proximity to one another. The D.C. public spaces that will be militarized and overpoliced in the weeks to come are exactly where you can best observe the interdependence and plurality that make cities great, and that conservatives view as a threat to their own ideological ends.

As much as I loved viewing D.C. through the Oakleys of a DEA agent, it feels silly to take what federal officers are doing in the city even a little bit seriously, because the fantasy of D.C. as some crime-addled hellhole is a deliberate invention. Violent crime in the District recently hit a 30-year low. The members of the D.C. National Guard who have begun policing the city live in and around the city; many of them must realize that a woman using a walker while drinking a beer in the park with her family does not pose a threat to public order. But the age-old tale of the lawless, dystopian city is still a tantalizing myth to people who have never spent significant time in one, or who have a racial and political interest in demonizing urban communities.

At the Mall on Tuesday, I felt a surge of recognition when I saw a crowd of 6-year-olds rush by clutching pencils and pads, clearly engaged in some kind of scavenger hunt. That’s what the National Guard and federal agents will be doing in D.C., isn’t it? They’ll spend most of their time roaming around, searching for the petty crimes and aesthetic offenses on the list they’ve been given: a lit joint, an open beer, a tent pitched under an overpass, men looking for work outside Home Depot. The point of a scavenger hunt is not to produce anything of value; the items on the list don’t add up to any coherent, meaningful narrative. But when you’re occupied by that idle busywork, it’s easy enough to convince yourself it matters.

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